Thursday, October 28, 2010

Weather Applet Re-Wrapped

For a number of years we have used a global weather applet which has become very popular. The reason why this application is worth the time to develop is because otherwise you have hundreds of people during the day navigating around the Internet to look for information; this is especially true during inclement weather. Instead just one daemon runs and downloads all of this information ONCE and saves it to a shared directory. Then when users activate this applet, they load in these pictures and get current information. This greatly reduces Internet usage and helps our bandwidth.

I re-wrapped this application with greater flexibility and made it consistent with the new desktop helper MIME bars that I wrote. One of the biggest problems that users have is getting information around the network, "I'm looking at this image, but I have no idea how to get it to email or to print it". So there are now options to take the currently displayed image and save it, copy it to the clipboard for later paste, print it or email it directly from the UI.

I just pushed this live and bound it to the Super-F9 key, let's see what my early beta testers say. :)

Up next: Cleaning up other dialogs and screens from the older desktop, installing patches and poking for bugs and installing more icons with links to our internal software. Still on target for wider beta deployment in November.